Works by Colby College's painting instructor, Bevin Engman, will share space with eighteenth and nineteenth century Japanese prints at the Colby College Museum of Art, beginning February 14. An opening reception for both exhibits is planned for 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 14, and the public is invited.

In the museum's Davis Gallery, the exhibition of Colby's Charles Hovey Pepper Collection of Japanese prints will include more than 25 examples of "ukiyo-e" or "images of the floating world." Pepper was a member of Colby's class of 1889 before going on to study and work as an artist in France, where he began collecting prints from Japan. He later traveled extensively in Asia, where he continued to collect, before settling in Concord, Mass. While much of his collection now resides at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, some of the finest examples, by such eighteenth century Japanese masters as Utamaro and Eishi, were left to Colby, where they are being publicly displayed for the first time. Prints by Pepper, himself, done in the style of ukiyo-e, will also be displayed. The show is co-curated by Colby's art department chair Michael Marlais and student Marta Miko '99. A demonstration of the Japanese printmaking process, provided by Colby's printmaking instructor Scott Reed, will be part of the exhibit, along with information on how to recognize quality prints. The Charles Hovey Pepper Collection will remain on display through March 21.

Occupying the Jetté Gallery will be more than 20 selections from the most recent work of studio art faculty member Bevin Engman. Engman paints still lifes of books in a variety of positions and relationships and explains that "it is the movement away from their initial neutral form toward a subjective use that interests me."

Engman's work has been exhibited in New York City, Boston and Philadelphia and at galleries in Connecticut and Maine. She recently was one of 56 artists chosen from more than 900 to participate in the Portland Museum of Art's Maine Biennial exhibition. A New York Times critic said her work in that show was "elegantly composed."

Engman received a bachelor's degree from Virginia's College of William and Mary and was also awarded a bachelor of fine arts by the Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art). She earned her master of fine arts degree in painting at the University of Pennsylvania, where her work was singled out for the Charles Addams Memorial Prize. The awarding of a two-year teaching fellowship kept Engman at Penn, where she served as an instructor of drawing in both the fine arts and architecture departments. She has been an assistant professor at Colby since 1996. Engman's work will be on display through March 28.

The Colby College Museum of Art is on the college's 700-acre campus in Waterville. Museum hours are Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. and from 2-4:30 p.m. on Sundays. Admission is free, and the museum is accessible to disabled persons.